Evernote: A Surprising Center for Collaboration

I’ve been an enthusiastic Evernote user for quite a while, but until recently I didn’t think of it in terms of a collaboration tool. Rather, it was the place that I would stash notes about all sorts of different topics. However, the web-based notebook tool’s evolution has made it far more useful as a base for collaboration — including at the enterprise level — than anyone might expect.

That evolution started with the addition of the shared notebooks feature over a year ago. But it hit a whole new level with the launch of the Evernote Trunk, an app store for Evernote. If you’re looking for a way to easily store, organize and share information with your team, Evernote has become an extremely useful tool.

Getting Information Into Evernote

The hardest part of using many collaboration tools is getting information into your system. But using Evernote — and the huge array of tools that work with it — means that no matter where you are and what you’ve been doing, there’s a way to get that information into your system. You can take a photo of a business card and send it straight to Evernote. You can record a summary of what happened in a meeting and share it through Evernote. There are even notepads made just for Evernote users that are particularly easy to scan and add to your account.

Smartphones work well with Evernote, which means even more freedom for telecommuters. While your distributed team may not be able to work from tropical beaches every day, they certainly can share information without getting sand in their computers.

Getting Information Back Out of Evernote

Evernote won’t ever take the place of a full-fledged project management tool, at least for a team or large group of people. But it can certainly augment other products. Several of the new tools in the Evernote Trunk are geared towards letting you use Evernote to organize information and then get it into the systems where you need it. Tarpipe, for instance, allows you to pull content from Evernote and use it with social media.

A Free Service

To use all these tools, you don’t even need Evernote’s premium service. You can rely quite well on the free service. Only two factors might make it important for certain users: faster image recognition and the ability to search PDFs.

There is an incredible amount of flexibility within Evernote that can make it an ideal addition to your collaboration toolbox.

Share your tips for using Evernote as a collaboration tools in the comments.